9:12pm February 4, 2015

Another reason I usually stay away from LGBTQ Community Centers

CW: Racism, ableism, child molesters, police, when “your” community isn’t.

So there was this guy who was on the board, and always seemed to be at every activity. The man was an asshole. Everyone knew itbut nobody stood up to him. I remember him talking about how the KKK was just about having picnics and get-togethers for white people.

And there was a woman, she had a psychiatric disability and could not pass for neurotypical if she tried. And she didn’t try. And this guy would engage her in pointless cruel arguments over whether she had a “motorcycle” or just a “moped”. Anyway one night he was bragging about how he was going to look charitable by buying her a TV, bu that his real purpose was to keep her out oof the community center. He talked about how it should be legal for parents to murder their severely disabled children or something along those lines. And whiel we were reeilng from that, he told us that pedophiles were just another misunderstood sexual orientation and our society wasn’t ready to handle that.

My friend who took me to the community center wasn’t sure whether she was straight or bi, and this becomes important in a minute.

So when he says the pedophile thing, I ran across the roojm and crouched behind a shelf so I didn’t h ave to look at him. My heart was pounding and I think i was having a panic attack if not a flashback.

He said “See, society isn’t ready to handle pedophiles.”

And my friend was like, “Mel was molested, you asshole” or something along those lines.

He said, “See, she’s too close to the issue to be objective about it. And this isn’t even your commuity center, you said you didn’t feel like you could label yourself. This place is for gay people.”

At the end, I was showing off a button I had bought there. I bought it not knowing its history. It said, “Riots not Diets, Fat Dykes are Revolting, Expect Something Big.” I loved it and bought it on the spot. At the time I was definitely, as now, in the Death Fats category. But even a thin person could wear that button, it’s not like it declared a size-based identity, it just made a lot of hilarious size acceptance puns.

Anyway, I’d found out that a friend had designed it in the seventies or eighties. I wore it to keep something of her close. Like the dad-shirtss, I related to people through objects. And Mr. Gay Asshole Dude starts criticizing me for wearing it when I’m “not THAT fat”. (I weighed as much as I did when I started getting fat anon hate. I assure I was that fat, this guy was just fatter than most fat people and judged us against his standard.“

I experienced the criticism as an attack on my friendship with the woman who designed it – my second mother, as we call her in my family, because when I grew up she took up a lot of parenting duties my parents didn’t have the knowledge to prepare me for the world as a severely disabled adult who needed services and SSI/DAC to survive.

So I said "But she is that fat, the woman who made the button.”

He also said he’d seen an autistic boy on TV and I didn’t look like him. I had half a mind to tell him he didn’t look like Dame Edna so he couldn’t be gay. (Yes, I know Dame Edna wasn’t gay – know because I know a woman he apparently molested, in a long string of others – but the point is television caricatures are not reality.)

And I left.

And I got so upset I had a meltdown on the bus for home: Two drivers (one in training) asked me two separate contradictory questions, and I started screaming and banging my head and finally froze and couldn’t move . The cops were called, and they spent a long time trying to work out if I wss male or female. That was their top concern. Then they started wondering if I was beeathing or not. After they determined that I was, they found my Medic-Alert bracelet, who connected them to my dad, who said take me home, don’ take me to the station, don’t take me to the ER. So they closed off the whole bus and drove me home in ii, making me feel like a waste of resources. This was after they called my home number a zilliion times expecting it to be a group home, not an apartment.

I kept myself amused by thinking about Cal Montgomery’s “Critic of the Dawn” because it never would occur to them I would be able to think about Bruce and Mary, and how they were treating me like Bruce, and my place in disability history.

The only upside to this was I’d had enough bus incidents, and this was the final straw, that the county just automatically let me use paratransit from then on. Which had its own problems, but it worked.

But seriously between that guy and some others… I reported him to the board, and they said everything he did was out of line except the comments about disabled children, because that was a “matter of personal opinion”. That’s always the way with disability discrimination, even when it’s identical in all but name to other kinds of discriminatio, it’s somehow okay when we’re disabled.

With all that, I stopped going to that place very often, and only when I had kava spray on me. (An herbal anti-anxiety med that came in a form you could spray under your tongue. That stuff helped me survive some brutally traumatic situations.)